There may be a time and a place for everything. The difficulty is figuring out when and where.

Thoughts on Returning to The Survey

Before I begin, let me say, I really don’t think that I believe that the best way to teach historical reading is through survey courses. In my fantasy world, we’d completely re-envision the way that we teach literature historically at the undergraduate level, and it wouldn’t involve a bunch of survey sequences. That said, my radical and revolutionary ideas will never have traction in my current department, at least not for 20 or so years, so I’m playing the hand that I’m dealt.

But so anyway, I’m teaching the survey (or my specialization’s piece of it) for the first time in four years next semester. Because I haven’t taught it for so long, I’ve needed to think carefully about what I will teach. And because I love nothing more as a procrastination excuse (It’s productive procrastination!) than writing a syllabus, I spent tonight figuring out my survey course for the Spring.

Working on a course like this is an excellent intellectual endeavor. Unlike more specialized upper-level courses, it forces you to make choices. Does it matter that I teach a woman writer in the Romantic period? (Kind of no, except kind of I should and so I managed it). To what extent is representation across genres (poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction) important? (I believe that it is, so I did distribute the material across genres, though let’s not lie: there’s more poetry than anything else because it’s short.) Should the survey really bring us to the present moment, or could I cut it off at, say, 1945? ( I totally believe I need to bring them to the present moment.)
Decisions I’ve made:

No novel this time. In the past, I’ve always insisted on teaching a novel. But that takes up two weeks. And frankly, I’ve learned that I care more about getting up to the present moment than I care about teaching a novel in this particular course. I still teach fiction… but no, no novel this time around. I might be ok with this, once I process it a bit more. Because I do really care a LOT about novels.

I’ve added in some authors that I’ve previously ignored. I think that’s good.

Since I’ll be teaching this class on Monday night, and since we start a week before MLK day, I’ve had to rethink my first day of class. Before, the first day was about introducing them to Romanticism. Now, that seems dumb as we’ll have two weeks before we really get to the Romantic period. So this time, I’m doing the first day as a total overview of the class, with “touchstone texts” from each of the periods that we’ll cover. Will it work? Who knows? But I think it’s an interesting experiment. Also, it will allow me to force them to listen to this song, which TOTALLY references “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” And that’s awesome.

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7 Responses

When I teach the survey of British Literature covering 1785 to the present, I do not pretend that the survey is adequate: I repeatedly tell my students that the class neglects a key genre, the novel. We read a few novellas, but nothing of any length. I compensate by recommending some upper-level courses on the British novel that they might take. Sometimes I give little updates: “Right now we are not reading *Great Expectations*”; “It would be wonderful here if we could read *A Passage to India*; let me quickly tell you what we are missing” (my students then discover that I have an odd sense of what the word “quickly” means).

I’m not entirely happy that the *Norton Anthology* trimmed the selections from *Ulysses* in order to include *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*. The selection of Romantic-era women poets in the Norton is quite good.

Your idea of “touchstone texts” is great. It is best not to get chronological right away, partly because the obvious starting points when you proceed that way (Blake’s *Songs*, the *Lyrical Ballads*) are often hard for the students to get excited about. The next time I teach the course, I might begin with a week on some key poems that I know students respond to: Keats’s “Chapman’s Homer”; Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”; Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” . . . Right now I begin with some Romantic-era poems about London, and these poems give me a chance to talk about both poetic conventions and changes in British society. In the first class, I do give a succinct lecture on the British Isles, British history up to 1832, etc., but I do not introduce Romantic literature as such, preferring to work that information into our class discussions of specific poems.

Yes, it’s all very white male, but I correct that impression throughout the rest of the course. Point is? YES students should read those poems. And reading them for/on the first day? And letting them try to figure out the periods through those poems? I think it’s a worthwhile exercise. Let’s just hope the kiddies get on board quickly :)

I ignore Yeats. A terrible beauty is born; I get it. And he’s still angry that Maud Gonne picked some other guy. Blake is wonderful if you spend time on him and if you utilize the illuminated books available online on the Blake Archive, but the survey needs to move quickly. I do only six poems.

Your touchstones look great, although I need to steer clear of any Wordsworth poem that involves dancing with daffodils. If I were to place “The Charge of the Light Brigade” at the beginning of the semester, I would ask my students to re-read it months later when we get to the World War I poets.

I am glad to see that you and I each teach a Larkin poem that not only is great literary art but also features the word “fuck.” Some of my undergraduate students over the years have been utterly oblivious to the beauty of this word and totally unaware that it is uttered by cultured, educated people. When I can play a role in their enlightenment on this matter, I feel that I am helping to carry out my university’s mission.